OnStar Ties Future Services to Verizon LTE, Opens APIs

OnStar said Sunday night at the Consumer Electronics Show that it would open its APIs to access the OnStar cloud, and struck a more formal agreement with Verizon to integrate LTE technology into future devices.

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OnStar said Sunday night at the Consumer Electronics Show that it would open its APIs to access the OnStar cloud, and struck a more formal agreement with Verizon to integrate LTE technology into future devices.

Linda Marshall, president of OnStar, said that the company is working hard to react quickly to changes in technology, which can be quickly obsolete in the slow development cycles of major automakers.

"My biggest learning is that we need to change our thinking we're a services, a telecommunications system within a manufacturing areas."
OnStar can't be beholden to the 3-5 year cycles that cars are developed on, said Marshall said.

OnStar receives 2 calls per second; two recent OnStar assistance events included helping delivering a baby over the phone in the mountains of Montana. In Asia, OnStar also helped a customer propose to his girlfriend. In China, the company receives 1 million button pushes per month, versus 3 million/mo for North America.

Last July, OnStar launched the OnStar FMV, an aftermarket rear-view mirror with the OnStar service built in. OnStar has more than 20,000 customers, Marshall said. Ford and Toyota are the two brands whose owners buy the most OnStar FMVs, bringing General Motors technology to non-GM brands.

OnStar is owned by General Motors, who used a press conference here to round up a number of announcements from GM brands.

OnStar showed off its integration with the Cadillac Cue, a navigation and entertainment system that Cadillac began showing off in October. CUE will debut in 2012 in the Cadillac XTS and ATS luxury sedans and SRX luxury crossover, Cadillac said. The newest Cue member? The new Cadillac ATS, Cadillac's answer to the BMW 3-series, that it launched on Sunday.

Like other infotainment systems, CUE uses a large touchscreen mounted in the center of the dash; in CUE's case, Cadillac chose a 8-inch fully capacitive touch screen with an optical lens, that provides haptic feedback - a pulse - when a command is selected. Cue takes a page from smartphones, with numerous soft buttons that provide different inputs depending on the context.

"Customers want things that are elegant, intuitive and simple to use," said Jim Vurpillat, global marketing director of Cadillac, in a press conference on Sunday.

Cue is a Linux based architecture that runs Linux and HTML 5, an open architecture that Cadillac pledged to constant update. "Customers expect OnStar to be integrated," Vurpillat said.

Over the last 16 years, Onstar have built ATOMS, the telematics program that serving 6 million people every day.

Nick Pudar, vice president of planning and business development of OnStar, said that OnStar plans to open up its APIs to third party developers, to allow them to develop third-party apps on its ATOMS platform. OnStar already has a mobile app, RemoteLink.

"We're looking for OnStar developers who can buld new services in new and exciting ways," Pudar said.
The first developer to take advantage of the API is RelayRides, which allows car owners to rent their cars out to third parties, with RelayRides-provided insurance. The rates are quite cheap - less than $7 per hour in sme cases. Shelby Clark, the chief executive of RelayRides, said a mobile app to take advantage of the new APIs would be released "soon".

Last year, OnStar caused a flap via an updated privacy policy that stated that it would collect data as long as a data connection was active, including such details as the location and speed of the vehicle, as well as such fine-grained details as the odometer readings and tire pressure. Consumers complained because OnStar continued to monitor the system even after a customer discontinued the service. But after consumer pressure, OnStar reversed course.
Finally, OnStar announced a partnership with Verizon, whose LTE technology was showed off in a research concept at last year's Consumer Electronics show. For this year, OnStar executives said that they will work with Verizon to integrate LTE-powered services in future LTE platforms. As a demonstration, the company showed off an LTE-powered Skype call to the back seat of a Chevy Volt elsewhere in Las Vegas.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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